Above photo: Colorado Street in Pasadena, c. 1880.
“A view from South Orange Grove Ave., Pasadena, 1876.”
Colorado Street leading into Pasadena in 1884.
The opening day of the small, but important, Los Angeles & San Gabriel Valley Railroad, which provided train service from from downtown Los Angeles to Pasadena. Two years later, it became the California Central Railway, before becoming a part of the Santa Fe Railroad in the early 20th century. The builder of the railroad was James Crank, who was one of the founders of Monrovia a year later.
Photo dated: September 16, 1885. (LAPL 00032351)
U.S. President Benjamin Harrison’s 1891 “motorcade” outside of the Los Angeles House, a hotel in Pasadena.
The Arroyo Seco Bikeway (also known as the California Cycleway) was a 1.3 mile, four lane bicycle toll road bridge that ran between Pasadena’s Green Hotel and the Raymond Hotel.
The road was constructed between 1899 and 1901. Pasadena bicyclists paid .10 cents for a one way passage and .15 cents for a round trip.
Its owner, Horace Dobbins, chairman of the Pasadena City Board of Supervisors, had originally wanted his tollway to extend from downtown Pasadena to Los Angeles. Dobbins received financial help from former California Governor Henry Harrison Markham, who used his connections to secure state funding. Dobbins next incorporated the California Cycleway Company and bought a six-mile right-of-way from downtown Pasadena to Avenue 54 in Highland Park, Los Angeles.
However, Dobbins plans failed. The bicycle craze was replaced by the horseless carriage and the expansion of the Pacific Electric Railway.
The existing bicycle bridge flopped. Within ten years of its completion, the bridge was dismantled.
A photo of a woman taken in Pasadena in 1901.
Celebrity Orator, humorist, and clergyman Robert J. Burdette’s mansion at 891 South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena, CA, circa 1907. He died there in 1914.
Marengo Avenue, circa 1910.
Photographer: H.C. Tibbetts
Bowen Court, built by Alfred and Arthur Heineman between 1910 and 1912, begins at 539 E. Villa St. It is the oldest bungalow court in Pasadena. Postcard image, circa 1915 or thereabouts.
People enjoying the obstacle golf course (miniature golf) on the front lawn of the Hotel Huntington in the 1920s.
Photographer: Farciot Edouart / LAPL 00036087
The Mother Goose Pantry was a kid-oriented restaurant located at 1955 E. Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena, CA.
In the 1939 novel Day of the Locust, author Nathaniel West reportedly based his Cinderella Bar on the Mother Goose Pantry. West’s Cinderella Bar, however, was a stucco glass slipper where female impersonators entertained customers.
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Rose Queen Dorothy Edwards, dressed as a fairy, stands on top of a rose held by a court princess. Nice trick photography from 1933. (LAPL)
The intersection of Fair Oaks and Green Street, circa 1941. The Castle Green is far left. (LAPL 00061148)
Members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union crashes a Pasadena bar in 1947. (LAPL)
In the summer of 1950, Pasadena police raided a bookie joint at 217 South Fair Oaks (now an art & craft studio called the Folk Tree). Prior to WWII, the Sameshima Laundry, a Japanese owned business, occupied the same space.
(LAPL 00039617)
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